Hidden Motives: Anatomy of a Smear Against Marc Gafni – Chaya Lester

Marc Gafni is breaking the silence in this series of video responses to his former wife. Chaya Lester is a former wife of Marc’s, who by her own admission was a key organizer of the false complaints in Israel in 2006. Chaya partnered with David Ingber in the false complaints in 2006 and in the smear campaign of 2015/16.

The playlist above consists of five videos.

You can watch them all on this page. Just click play on the video above and they will play one after the other.

If you want to skip any of the videos, click the little arrow on the videos while they are playing that looks like this:

and you will get to the next video in the playlist.

In the beginning of this series, which is the third and final section in the anatomy of a smear videos, Marc Gafni declares his intention “to respond with as much gentleness as I can, but with clarity and without mincing words and to try and directly address what’s happened here.” He then goes on to say:

This set of videos is in some sense the most painful one for me to do, because it’s about Chaya Lester, my ex-wife. Now, I am really mortified to have to break the silence. Chaya has written five letters against me, and yet she’s perpetually breaking the silence. I mean, she’s broken the silence so many times that it’s shattered. I’ve never spoken against Chaya in the last 10 years. And I preferred to bear the dignity of her lies, falsehoods, distortions in silence, because the dignity of silence seemed preferable to me, if not morally then at least aesthetically, than to have to respond to my angry ex-wife in the public space.

Marc then explains why at this point it’s out of integrity for him to maintain the silence.

I wanted to, even during this latest smear campaign in which Chaya has been one of the three or four major partners, written three times, three public posts against me, besides the earlier post in 2008, which I’ll talk about, and the post in 2006, which I’ll talk about. I still preferred to maintain silence. And one person in particular—then a group of people supported him—in my inner circle of friends and colleagues and partners and collaborators, really insisted that I respond and almost did an intervention with me and said that it’s just out of integrity, even if it involves sharing the personal in the public space.

Gafni continues:

Now, Chaya has done that with impunity and with what I can only understand to be deliberate falsehood or confused falsehood—hard for me to know Chaya’s interior, although there are so many objective lies it’s hard to imagine that it’s not deliberate. But, be that as it may, she’s decided to kind of tell her perspective of the story of our marriage in the public space in a way that’s horrifically distorted. But just imagine that you have a difficult marriage that ends and then one partner decides to tell the story they tell in therapy in the public space without the other side responding. Minimally, minimally, you’ve got a disaster.

If you want to just watch one of the 4 main videos on this page (after Marc Gafni’s Invitation to Chaya Lester), you can also watch them on single pages by following the links below.